Whale Oil Blogger Cameron Slaters bad dream – climbs into bed with arch nemesis Matthew Blomfield

Regular readers will remember that team LF started investigating the criminal antics of New Zealand conman Matthew John Blomfield back in 2013 soon after we received a nonspecific threat in an email. The threat followed on the tail of a piece we posted criticising Kiwi District Court Judge Charles Blackie for his decision in a case brought by Blomfield against the now infamous Kiwi blogger Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil.

Of course as we have always been at pains to point out we here at LF hold no flame for Slater, in fact before posting the piece we had been extremely critical of Slater and his obvious role as a National Party toady, Corporate Spin doctor and first class shit-head.

LF’s beef was, at the time, purely with judge Blackie, Matthew Blomfield’s bullshit tort and the Kiwi court system for having even considered Blomfield’s preliminary application, a half-arsed attempt to force Slater to disclose the sources he had relied on for his posts. It was also our view, at the time, that Slater did in fact qualify as a journalist, whether you liked him, agreed with his views, or not.

In fact anyone reading the majority of Slater’s clearly politically slanted bile, who then blindly accepted it as truth, as with Slater himself, probably needed a little psychiatric intervention – electro shock therapy comes to mind.

Notwithstanding all the political crap that Slater often publishes LF still holds the position that he qualifies as a journalist, it remains a valid opinion despite the recent release of emails and various other material that an anonymous hacker has managed to obtain, allegedly by unlawfully accessing Slater’s computer system and from there the various platforms Slater used to communicate with his many “admirers” and publish his blog. After all, there are journalists working in the mainstream media who are just as bad as Slater, arguably worse, a handful more deserving of the labels one-eyed, right-wing, facist and neanderthal.

The hacking and recent revelations of political skullduggery are quite a different matter to the argument of whether Slater had a right to, or had in fact guaranteed his sources the protections afforded in law to journalists and their sources. It remains to be seen whether the courts will use the current predicament Slater faces as cause to decide against Slater, but having said that, all indications prior to the revealations of Slater’s political impropriety, the corporate funded smear campaigns and corrupt dealings with politicians and the civil service, were that Slater was for all intents and purposes a journalist, thus the assurance’s he had given his sources should be honoured.

From the outset LF’s position was simple. We believed that Slater was a Journo, that the defamation tort that Blomfield had brought against Slater was little more than a fishing expedition, that any competent judge should have seen that fact and that Blomfield likely had little defense if any to the allegations Slater had published, hence Blomfields reluctance to pursue the substantive issue, the alleged defamation.

In fact Lauda Finem’s first article would probably have been our last had it not been for Blomfield emailing us with a series of ridiculous, completely spurious claims and somewhat implausible threats. Veiled threats, such as those employed by Blomfield are normally an indication that the person making the threats is for want of a better expression a complete and utter cocksmoker. The evidence of Blomfield’s crime and frauds are now to be found in page after page of LF posts detailing our investigations, Blomfield was indeed a cocksmoker, but he was so much more, he was and is a fraudster, a pathological liar, a nutjob and conman – in short Blomfield was everything Slater had alleged he was, and so much more.

So to recap LF was and continues to defend the rights of bloggers as journalists, to hold the same protections as the old media are afforded at law. Slater is a blogger, thus ipso facto, his sources deserve the protections available at law. That was and remains our position.

Given that Slater has argued his case solely on the basis of truth and of course being a journalist, and that as such his sources are a protected species we are now going to relate a story that will cast serious doubts on Slater’s integrity and reliability as a “journalist”. In the mainstream media Journalists have often faced contempt of court charges and been prepared to serve prison time in their efforts to protect their sources. A journalist who does not protect their sources knows full well that his or her career as a journalist will undoubtedly be at an end if they acquire a reputation for rolling over with little or no threat, even more so if they are then discovered doing a deal with the enemy so to speak.

As aforesaid we do not respect Slater’s opinions, nor the way he conducts himself generally, we had however, begrudgingly, given Slater due respect for the fact that he had sought to protect his sources in the face of an aggressive and somewhat irrational court action.

In defending Slater however, we had not sought to deal with him directly, in fact it was LF’s view that we should remain at arms length from the man and deal with the facts alone. It soon became apparent that Blomfield was, as aforesaid, a conman. With that fact established we then focused soley on investigating the allegations against him, a handful of them, the same allegations that Slater had levelled on his “Whale Oil” blog.

LF however, unlike Slater, went into the nuts and bolts of Blomfield’s historic offending, sought evidence other than that which had been supplied by sources and then set about finding more recent examples of his criminal behaviour. We have of course not finished our investigations, nevertheless to date we have evidenced more recent offending and will likely be able to establish prima facie further examples of his nefarious activities.

As part of our investigations we recently brought readers the first in a series of covertly obtained confessions by Kiwi Lawyer Graham Hare, who untill earlier this year had collaborated with Blomfield to conceal much of the offending. This first video tape is damning, which Blomfield himself no doubt knows, and the remaining three tapes contain further incriminating revelations.

In addition to the recently obtained recorded video evidence and the historic material that Slater had been handed with the hard drive LF have obtained an extra tranche of documents, inclusive of emails spanning the period 2011 – 2013, which our forensic team are now combing through, all of which castes a dark pale over the way in which the Official Assignee’s Office have handled matters and whether that statutory office and various “friendly” liquidator’s acted, as required by statute, to protect the interests of the various companies, their shareholders and creditors.

Prior to LF posting the #Operation Haresay tape Blomfield had, in addition to his defamation tort, also laid a complaint against Slater with New Zealand’s Human Rights Commissioner. At the time LF suspected that this complaint was little more than yet another attempt, using the backdoor, to obtain the identities of Slater’s sources. That suspicion has recently proved correct, detailed in emails (below) between Slater and the barrister, Simon Judd, prosecuting the case for the Human Rights Commission. These emails evidence that the Human Rights Commissioner certainly appears to be attempting to obtain the identities of Slater’s sources despite the fact that the High Court has yet to rule on Slater’s appeal, all of which sounds to us very much like contempt of court:

In his quest Blomfield had also sought to use the New Zealand Police in further attempts to obtain the identities of Slaters sources, and the identities of the team at the helm of LF (not that the NZ police could have helped in any event). In doing so Blomfield had knowingly laid one of those false police complaints against Mr Marc Spring, in fact it was the second in two years that Spring had been subjected to, both of these complaints designed to intimidate Spring.

With the  latest false allegation Blomfield had clearly hoped to gouge Spring, bullying him into naming the former Hell Pizza founder Warren Powell as Slater’s source with the inducement that he would then leave Spring and the others alone. In fact all of Blomfield’s efforts, dating back to his filing of the defamation tort against Slater, have been in aid of inveigling ex Hell Pizza founder Warren Powell.

LF managed to collect additional evidence of this fact, Blomfield’s true intention, by covertly recording a telephone call that Blomfield made to Spring, soon after Spring had been interviewed by the New Zealand police (covertly obtained video of that police interview can be viewed here).

In the recorded telephone conversation, between Blomfield and Spring (below), it becomes crystal clear that Blomfield only wanted Warren Powell’s name, clearly he was not at all interested in anyone other than Powell, including Cameron Slater. So why then file a defamation tort against Slater? Interestingly when questioned about his dealings in and around the Hell Pizza reacquisition there is an obviously akward silence before Blomfield eventually responds to the question Spring poses.

This tape confirmed LF’s hypothesis that Blomfield’s defamation tort was never a genuine claim, he had no intention of continuing the defamation action once he had obtained the names of those who had provided Slater with the information, any substantive defamation proceeding would have failed and Blomfield would have been left with little more than a shit load of costs awarded against him for the effort, hence his last decision to let the taxpayer foot the bill and use the Human Rights Commission, in the hope that a well funded statutory body would be more successful than his own bogged down and extremely expensive High Court litigation.

Blomfield’s ruse had certainly fooled District Court Judge Blackie, he’d even managed to fool the Human Rights Commissioner, but not a High Court Justice, nor team LF for that matter. Once we had established the likely origins of the malice that Blomfield held for Powell it was then a relatively simple task to work out Blomfield’s likely end game, and the game plan that depended on three very important tenets. The first, that Warren Powell had in fact been one of Slater’s sources. The second, that Blomfield had the goods on Warren Powell, over dealings in other corporate matters, and the third, that Warren Powell was worth millions of dollars, and of course had the ability to write Blomfield a cheque.

It’s a technique more commonly known as extortion, or blackmail, and it’s a game often played by criminal’s. In fact Blomfield has become particularly good at playing this game, his most recent victim, Kiwi/Indian business person, Mr Shiv Mattu, who according to lawyer Graham Hare was forced by Blomfield to hand over almost $30’000.00 cash, in a carpark next to the offices of lawyer Bruce Johnson’s Central Park Legal, whilst under threat of being dobbed in to New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department.

If Lawyer Graham Hare is telling the truth, and there is absolutely no reason to doubt him, then the New Zealand Police should move immediately to interview Mr Mattu. In fact it’s exactly this sort of criminal behaviour, allegedly on the part of Blomfield, that is likely to have precipitated the now infamous armed home invasion, perhaps by someone who had good reason to seek revenge.

LF had picked up on Blomfield’s obsession with Warren Powell very early on in our own investigation, an obvious pathology that Slater had overlooked until three days ago when he sought to use it to his own advantage. Blomfield did not seem at all concerned with anyone other than Powell that might have been a source that Slater had relied on.

As a result we started focusing on the business dealings between Blomfield and Powell and discovered a very interesting historic business relationship, so interesting that it has in fact, to some extent, become a primary focus in our ongoing investigation.

LF does not, at this stage, propose to go into any great detail on the circumstances surrounding those failed business dealings and the reasons why they may have caused the animosity between Blomfield and Powell other than to note that Warren Powell and his two partners sold Hell Pizza for 15 million Dollars and then under what we would consider quite extraordinary circumstances the trio reacquired the business, a relatively short time later, for a third of that sale price, 5 Million dollars. A transaction that soon afterwards saw Blomfield set about publicly attacking and ridiculing Warren Powell using his mainstream media contacts.

Of course Slater whilst he was publishing the material on Blomfield was completely unaware of the Blomfield/Powell animus, however once LF was dragged into commenting on the legal attack on all bloggers, via Slater, and as LF’s own investigations slowly progressed Slater was fed updates by a mutual source, although he was never given, to the best of LF’s knowledge, a complete understanding of what had really transpired between the pair. That fact however it seems has not prevented Slater from now using the sparse information he had been given in an attempt to extricate himself from Blomfield’s web of deceit and vexatious litigation; all of which, again, by design had ultimately been intended to target Mr money bags, Warren Powell, alone.

Slater’s latest, and most extraordinarily duplicitous, attempt to extricate himself from the litigation Blomfield had launched in mid 2013 started three days ago, the 1st September, when Slater was allegedly first contacted by Matthew Blomfield. What amazes team LF is that Slater must have known that Blomfield was only contacting him, if it was him who first made contact, because LF had started publishing hard evidence of his criminal offending, evidence that would have seen Slater prevail at any substantive hearing of Blomfields bullshit defamation case.

Slater however does not seem to have been too concerned with that fact. Nor does he seem to have been too concerned with the fact that Simon Judd, acting for the Human Rights Commissioner, had attempted to act to abrogate or ignore the impending High Court decision on the rights of Slater’s sources to anonymity.

At the same time Slater was communicating with Blomfield he was also chatting with one of our mutual sources, fishing for additional information on none other than Warren Powell, an action that seemed very suspicious. The source immediately contacted an LF operative and explained what had been unfolding in Slaters Skype texts;

Key: LFA = Lauda Finem Asset, Whaleoil = Cameron Slater

[31/08/14 6:59:16 pm] LFA: Has Matt been on you?

[31/08/14 6:59:35 pm] Whaleoil: yes

[31/08/14 6:59:40 pm] LFA: Saying what?

[31/08/14 7:19:11 pm] Whaleoil: he is wanting a deal

[31/08/14 7:19:18 pm] Whaleoil: he isn’t after you and (redacted)

[31/08/14 7:19:24 pm] LFA: Has he put that in writing?

[31/08/14 7:19:26 pm] Whaleoil: realises now you have nothing


[31/08/14 7:19:29 pm] Whaleoil: he is after Warren


[31/08/14 7:19:33 pm] Whaleoil: yes in emails


[31/08/14 7:20:02 pm] Whaleoil: he wants proof that warren or someone working for warren gave me the hard drive.

[31/08/14 7:20:02 pm] LFA: Can you send them to me please? I will not share them but think we need to think about it and have a discussion.


[31/08/14 7:20:14 pm] LFA: I wasn’t working for Warren.

[31/08/14 7:20:21 pm] LFA: Which we all know.


[31/08/14 7:20:36 pm] Whaleoil: yup and I have kept you out of discussions

[31/08/14 7:20:37 pm] LFA: He always knew I had nothing.

A decision was made to feed Slater false information and see whether or not, in the fullness of time, that false information would flush Matthew Blomfield out of the sewer that we had surmised he and the gullible Slater had both been hiding.

It came as no surprise then when Blomfield did appear later that same day, via email. What was surprising however was the speed with which it happened. Within forty-five minutes of Slater having received the false information, Blomfield had cut and pasted Slater’s quite extraordinary emails, complete with the fabrications we’d fed him, and hit the send button. LF then organised for Blomfield’s emails to bounce back – whilst we of course retained them

LF has also retained a complete transcript of the Skype texting between our mutual source and Slater, it makes for very interesting reading. Slater, who genuinely believed that he had been successful in pulling the proverbial wool over, thinking that he’d obtained what he needed, abruptly ended the text session, falsely claiming that he needed to hide from the journo’s that were camped outside his house.

Hey Presto – LF had now successfully obtained irrefutable evidence that Warren Powell had always been Blomfield’s intended target. Blomfield’s emails, which he had intended be forwarded to Powell, are evidence of Blomfield’s likely end game – to extort money from Powell.

We’ll let Blomfield’s two emails speak for themselves, the emails Blomfield thought no one had received:

Of course the information Slater though he could promise Blomfield didn’t exist but the idea that it might have proved to be irresistible bait for the two dogs LF had caged! And to think Slater though so little of team LF, – “Idiots” indeed Mr Slater.

Poor old Matty and Cam two deluded clowns that thought that they could do a self-serving deal, of course Blomfield will soon be looking very silly. But what about Slater’s status as a journo, a status that he used to swear on oath in court; that as a journo he needed to be “trusted” to be able to protect his many sources? We suspect that anyone thinking of providing Slater with “inside information” in the future should now be thinking twice before doing so.

This is important, the fact that Slater’s defence during Blomfield’s defamation proceedings, and his own High Court appeal, had always been that he was protecting his sources, a principled stand that he was obviously now only to prepared to abandon, when the opportunity appeared to arise, in the face of the mainstream media’s onslaught, following the release of the Hager Book Dirty Politics.

So is Cameron Slater a candidate for filthy Maggot cunt of the year? In the absence of a plausible explanation from the fat-boy himself we here at LF certainly think so. Can Cameron Slater really be trusted to keep his sources safe? We here at LF think not.

Despite all of his bluster and bullshit rhetoric Slater has proven that if the good ship Whale Oil looks like it’s about to sink below an oil slick, then Captain Slater intends being one of the first Rat’s to grab a lifeboat.

Slater now claims that it was Blomfield that contacted him first, that may well be true, but it could equally have been Slater that made the first approach, in any event when asked to produce Blomfield’s emails Slater has repeatedly failed to do so. We suspect that he knows that by supplying Matthew Blomfield’s emails it might just raise a few more ugly questions that he’d rather not have to answer.

LF suspects that if Blomfield ever does manage to contact Warren Powell he’ll be given his marching orders, then he’ll no doubt run off to that Human Rights Commission mate of his, Simon Judd, squealing like a stuck pig.

One really does have to laugh at the complete stupidity of Blomfield, but one cannot afford to laugh at the stupidity of the Human Rights Commission and the band of Nazi’s running the shop, for allowing themselves to be sucked in so badly, and by a complete fuckwit, the likes of Matthew John Blomfield.

Reference/Bibliography

http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/01/whaleoil-blog-judge-grants-discharged-bankrupt-license-for-fishing-expedition/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/05/unstable-hellboy-matt-blomfield-takes-on-lf/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/04/blackies-ruling-against-slater-without-authority-unenforceable-and-void/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/03/the-slater-case-the-circus-is-in-town-the-politically-motivated-clowns-have-joined/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/17/tvnz-john-hudson-matthew-blomfield-and-the-ruawai-property-scam-part-one/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/20/tvnz-john-hudson-matthew-blomfield-and-the-ruawai-property-scam-part-two/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/01/15/tvnz-john-hudson-matthew-blomfield-and-the-ruawhai-property-scam-part-3/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/09/matthew-blomfield-v-cameron-slater-the-day-the-boy-cried-wolf-and-got-caught/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/05/spewed-straight-from-matthew-blomfields-own-persed-lips-tips-from-an-entrepreneur/
http://laudafinem.com/2013/12/06/cameron-slater-case-fairfax-media-whore-maria-slade-comes-out-swinging-lf-delivers-king-hit/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/02/11/blowhard-blomfield-high-court-insolvency-specialist-judge-lang-to-hear-cameron-slater-appeal/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/05/12/matthew-blomfield-the-friendly-liquidator-the-dodgy-lawyers-trust-account-just-where-did-the-cash-go/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/05/15/matthew-blomfield-puppet-master-or-wannabe-lawyer/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/05/21/the-gospel-of-matthew-in-the-beginning-there-was-the-word-the-word-was-extortion/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/04/22/the-strange-case-of-matt-blomfield-and-spiderman/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/04/14/blowhard-fraudster-matt-blomfield-belted-blue-again-another-late-payment-notice-perhaps/
http://laudafinem.com/2014/06/22/exclusive-its-official-slaters-a-journo-the-whale-oil-blog-is-media-the-sources-should-be-safe-according-to-top-qc/
http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2538/en/new-zealand:-lange-v.-atkinson-and-another
http://www.nzlii.org/nz/other/nzlc/pp/PP33/PP33.pdf
http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2006/0069/latest/DLM393681.html
http://www.laudafinem.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/blogger-argues-for-media-protection-national-nz-herald-news.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
http://thestandard.org.nz/its-not-stolen-i-just-borrowed-it-without-asking/
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1312/S00070/cameron-slater-defamation-decision-of-judge-c-s-blackie.htm
http://thestandard.org.nz/what-the-hell/
http://thestandard.org.nz/cameron-slater-and-the-protection-of-journalist-sources/
http://thestandard.org.nz/when-the-wolf-cries-boy/
http://thestandard.org.nz/i-think-justice-blackie-got-it-right/
http://thestandard.org.nz/does-news-medium-consist-of-spreading-defamation-lies-and-rumours/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post
http://jononatusch.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/cameron-slater-journalist/
http://www.medialawjournal.co.nz/?p=622

Related articles

• Lawyer Responsible For Letting Matthew Blomfield Loose On The Public Now Holds Grave Concerns For His Own Safety.
• The Blomfield Files – #Operation Haresay, the day Jono did the dirty.
• Slater fed enough dough by cashed-up supporters to apply for Court injunction – to save his reptilian skin.